Rhizomatic Permeabilities in the New Poetry of the Indian Partition

Abstract

This paper aims at tackling the memory of the Indian Partition (1947) from the viewpoint of new ecological materiality, that studies inclusively and interrelatedly the biological reality of the corporeality of territories and their inhabitants, on the one side; while being aware of the entropic kinetics of tense bodies and their holistic and rhizomatic permeabilities, on the other. To this purpose, a reduced bunch of poems from a much wider corpus generated by this turning point is chosen, written by women authors such as Prerna Bakshi, Sujata Bhatt, Adeeba Talukder and Moniza Alvi. It does not by any means pretend to be exhaustive because it would be impossible to globally visualize the enormous amount of traumatic facts, echoes, mirages, revisions and rereadings that the Partition brings about–a wide scar that opens and bleeds with ease—especially when all kind of events, workshops and memorials of the 70^th and the 75^th anniversaries are so close. Among the most relevant items there could be highlighted, firstly, the construction of landscape imagery mediated by fracture; secondly, the problematization of the various ideological exiles caused by the Partition; or, lastly, the material integration of cultural and identity realities, seen as physical and tangible facts susceptible to development and transformation.